Politicians steered by fear

Published: Wednesday, March 20, 2013 at 02:21 PM.

Perhaps unintentionally, the anti-Ellmers page also highlights why it’s so hard to get anything done in Washington and why it seems Congress since 2010 has lurched from crisis to crisis.

Many representatives are in districts drawn in a way they can’t lose — unless they run afoul of their own party. Thus they have little incentive to reach across the aisle to the other party, which is a sure-fire way to get their own party mad at them.

The first thing, and maybe the only thing, you need to understand about Washington is that fear of losing drives the whole town. Many Congress folks seem to associate losing their seats as akin to death.

In this environment of fear, you can see how gerrymandering to create safe districts leads to gridlock.

In the U.S. House, too many districts are drawn in a way to almost guarantee that one party always wins, either Republican or Democrat.

This is why Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a Chicago-area Democrat, easily won re-election last year despite disappearing for several weeks. Soon after he won, he vacated the seat to enter rehab for substance abuse, and he eventually faced criminal charges. Another Democrat took his place in a special election.

Turning to Ellmers, she was elected as a tea party candidate in the GOP wave of 2010. That same year, a Census year, the new Republican majority in the N.C. General Assembly got to redraw the maps for U.S. congressional districts. Their goal was to send more Republicans to Congress and fewer Democrats.

The Republican who represents several counties, including a sliver of Alamance, appears on a website with other political targets, her picture rendered in black-and-white with her mouth open, a time-honored trick in political ads to make someone seem goofy or untrustworthy. The effort against Ellmers will be national, and by the 2014 mid-term elections, possibly millions will be spent to try to dislodge her from her seat in the 2nd Congressional district, after three terms.

You might assume her opponents are Democrats. She has some of those, too.

But the biggest threat to Ellmers will come from her fellow Republicans.

The conservative Club For Growth, a zero-tolerance, virulently anti-tax group, has deemed that Ellmers is no longer one of the herd. She has earned the dreaded appellation “RINO,” meaning Republican In Name Only.

At its website, PrimaryMyCongressman.com, the club even uses a rhinoceros image to decorate the page about Ellmers, whose conservative rating by another group, the American Conservative Union, is 91 (out of 100).

The Club For Growth page documents her sins: Among them, voting to increase the debt ceiling in 2011; voting for a budget that included funding for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, which was already law by then; and voting against cuts to the National Park System.

Perhaps unintentionally, the anti-Ellmers page also highlights why it’s so hard to get anything done in Washington and why it seems Congress since 2010 has lurched from crisis to crisis.

Many representatives are in districts drawn in a way they can’t lose — unless they run afoul of their own party. Thus they have little incentive to reach across the aisle to the other party, which is a sure-fire way to get their own party mad at them.

The first thing, and maybe the only thing, you need to understand about Washington is that fear of losing drives the whole town. Many Congress folks seem to associate losing their seats as akin to death.

In this environment of fear, you can see how gerrymandering to create safe districts leads to gridlock.

In the U.S. House, too many districts are drawn in a way to almost guarantee that one party always wins, either Republican or Democrat.

This is why Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a Chicago-area Democrat, easily won re-election last year despite disappearing for several weeks. Soon after he won, he vacated the seat to enter rehab for substance abuse, and he eventually faced criminal charges. Another Democrat took his place in a special election.

Turning to Ellmers, she was elected as a tea party candidate in the GOP wave of 2010. That same year, a Census year, the new Republican majority in the N.C. General Assembly got to redraw the maps for U.S. congressional districts. Their goal was to send more Republicans to Congress and fewer Democrats.

North Carolina is a purple state that narrowly voted for President Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. Our previous congressional delegation reflected this close split, with seven Democrats and six Republicans going to D.C.

But with the redrawing, the 2012 elections yielded nine Republicans and four Democrats — despite the fact that the Democratic candidates earned more actual votes. Put another way, Democratic House candidates earned 51 percent of the vote, but the party will only have 31 percent representation in Washington. This is as fine a specimen of pure gerrymandering as you’ll ever see and not exactly democratic (small “d”).

One consequence of the redrawing was to put Ellmers in a safe and snug bright-red district where it will be tough for her to lose to a Democrat.

But as the Club For Growth website makes clear, that does not mean Ellmers is on easy street. She has to constantly peer over her right shoulder at potential tea party challengers. From a purely political sense, she has no reason to work with Obama and the Democrats on anything.

Most representatives in her position simply toe the tea party line and wait to coast to victory next election. Ellmers was thrown off this safe course when party officials in the House began grooming her for top leadership. She’s quite photogenic and appears on TV a lot, often in the background in shots that feature Speaker of the House John Boehner and Eric Cantor, House majority leader.

But with leadership comes responsibility. She is expected to take tough votes that are unpopular with the GOP rank-and-file in order to break the numerous logjams with Democrats. Compromise makes Washington work but in today’s partisan environment is often perceived as betrayal.

The Club For Growth helped defeat longtime, venerable Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter in 2004. You think they can’t knock off Ellmers, a former nurse, with the right candidate?

The only way to remedy this problem of gerrymandering is to push for nonpartisan drawing of congressional districts. It sounds impossible, because the party in power, whether Democrat or Republican, would never go for it.

That’s why the people must press the case strongly — and hold future candidates for office accountable on whether they support nonpartisan districts.

I have a dream we can one day elect a critical mass of pols who truly put country first.

Myron B. Pitts is a columnist for the Fayetteville Observer. Contact him at pittsm@fayobserver.com